Vumatel passes 2 million homes with fibre

South Africa’s biggest home fibre network operator (FNO) — Vumatel — recently passed 2 million households with fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) connectivity.

Vumatel parent company Maziv said that one million of the homes were passed within the last three and a half years.

According to recent feedback given to MyBroadband, the number stood at 1.9 million in May 2023.

The latest rollouts were targeted specifically at underserviced, lower-income areas.

Vumatel’s network now consists of over 50,000km of fibre. The network of its sister company — Dark Fibre Africa — now measures 15,000km.

Vumatel chief operations officer Dewald Booysen said that the company believed broadband was critical to allow all South Africans to access opportunities on the global stage.

“We have rolled out coverage in areas like Soweto, Khayelitsha, Umlazi and many more. These are traditionally overlooked communities,” Booysen said.

“Vuma’s approach is also community-orientated and enables us to work with the community to overcome challenges that have traditionally hampered efforts.”

Dewald Booysen, Vumatel chief operations officer.

Vumatel first started rolling out fibre-to-the-home in Parkhurst, Johannesburg, in 2014, at a time when the technology was still very new for household usage.

It quickly became a dominant player in the market, while Telkom failed to capitalise on its advantage in trenched network infrastructure and lost hundreds of thousands of DSL customers who switched to fibre.

With this latest achievement, Vumatel has put more distance between itself and its primary FTTH rival — Telkom’s Openserve.

The FNO last reported it had passed just over 1,107,794 million homes by June 2023. Six months earlier, it had passed 1,022,011 homes with fibre.

Vuma reported 1,805,000 homes passed by December 2022, meaning it has rolled to roughly double the number of new homes that Openserve has since the start of 2023.

Openserve’s parent company Telkom is in a dire financial quagmire, which means it is unlikely to close the gap anytime soon.

However, Openserve’s rollout has proven more cost-effective than Vumatel’s, as it puts an emphasis on connectivity rates.

Nearly one out of every two houses that Openserve had passed with fibre by the end of June 2023, were connected to its network — with its connectivity rate at 46.5%.

While Maziv has not divulged Vumatel’s latest connectivity rate with the 2-million homes passed milestone, its connectivity rate stood at 33.2% in December 2022.

That means that roughly one out of every three houses with access to Vumatel’s network, choose the FNO.

Biggest fibre networks in South Africa

The table below summarises the homes passed and connected figures by South Africa’s biggest FTTH providers.

Figures for companies that haven’t recently updated their stats or aren’t publicly listed might be delayed.

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